SERVIR E&SA is working with the AST team from the University of Maryland to implement a regional and national crop monitor. The crop monitors provide an online interface where EO indicators such as NDVI and rainfall can be combined with other food security reports for better assessment of crop conditions.

The Regional crop monitor covers the IGAD region with country focal points reporting monthly crop conditions from which a food security bulletin will be generated and linked to the preseason quarterly climate outlook that is produced during the Greater Horn of Africa Climate Outlook Forum(GHACOF).

At the National level, the implementation of the National Crop monitor for Kenya will be done in collaboration with the State department of agriculture and will allow for reporting of crop conditions at the county level.

We are working with AST from the University of Oklahoma on their project titled"Forecasting and Communicating Water-Related Disasters in Africa" under the Water and Related Disasters service area

The main goal of the project is to develop an ensemble hydrologic prediction system (EF5), forced by weather and climate forecasts in a single continuum, to communicate flood forecasts on scales ranging from sub-daily to seasonal and in formats designed for better decision. The team will specifically equip the stakeholders with the skills to process geospatial data and use the tool for flood monitoring. The Applied Science Team work will be piloted for Nzoia Basin in Kenya and one basin in Uganda.

Key stakeholders include Kenya Met Department, Water Resources Management Authority (WRMA), and Ministry of Water and Irrigation in Kenya and Ministry of Water and Environment (MWE), Uganda Met Agency (UMA) and Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) in Uganda

Applied Science Team (AST): University of California Santa Barbara, USA

SERVIR E&SA is working with the Applied Science Team-2 partners (University of California Santa Barbara; University of Maryland; USFS; and The University of Oklahoma) and the SERVIR SCO to provide climate web services in order to enhance the hub’s capacity for climate services. This engagement will provide a platform where users can be able to access climate data sets from the Early Warning Explorer web application that is hosted in the RCMRD website. Some of the data sets available are CHIRPS rainfall, CHIRTS max temperature, WRSI among others. This service falls under weather and climate with applications in agriculture, food security, water resources and disasters.

Applied Science Team (AST): United States Forest Service researcher Sean Healey

This project is being implement by United States Forest Service researcher Sean Healey in collaboration with the SERVIR Eastern and Southern Africa hub, Google, Silva Carbon and Oregon State University. Its main objective is to leverage the entire archive off Landsat imagery through the Google earth engine to be able to track annual land cover changes.

Locally developed reference data is be used to calibrate a model that optimally integrates the output maps from each separate algorithm. This strategy was developed under an inter-agency, national change mapping project in the United States: the Landscape Change Monitoring System (LCMS).

The output and capacity building activities of this project responds to the needs of the region in utilizing methods that are robust at the same time delivering accurate and timelier results. Countries covered by the project include: Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Malawi, Ethiopia and Zambia.